66
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 22, 2016
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
DERAILED
The troubling allure of the Underground Railroad.
BY KATHRYN SCHULZ
ABOVE: MIGUEL PORLAN
T , via overland ex-
press, one spring evening in .
Three feet long, two feet wide, and two
and a half feet deep, it had been packed
the previous morning in Richmond, Vir-
ginia, then carried by horse cart to the
local o ce of the Adams Express Com-
pany. From there, it was taken to the rail-
road depot, loaded onto a train, and, on
reaching the Potomac, transferred to a
steamer, where, despite its label---
---it was placed up-
side down until a tired passenger tipped
it over and used it as a seat. After arriv-
ing in the nation's capital, it was loaded
onto a wagon, dumped out at the train
station, loaded onto a luggage car, sent
on to Philadelphia, unloaded onto an-
other wagon, and, finally, delivered to
North Fifth Street. The person to
whom the box had been shipped, James
Miller McKim, was waiting there to re-
ceive it. When he opened it, out scram-
bled a man named Henry Brown: five
feet eight inches tall, two hundred
pounds, and, as far as anyone knows, the
first person in United States history to
liberate himself from slavery by, as he
later wrote, "getting myself conveyed as
dry goods to a free state."
McKim, a white abolitionist with the
Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, had
by then been working for the Under-
ground Railroad for more than a decade,
and he was awed by the courage and
drama of Brown's escape, and of others
like it. In an article he wrote some years
later, he predicted that future genera-
tions of Americans would come to share
his emotions:
Now deemed unworthy o the notice o any,
save fanatical abolitionists, these acts o sub-
lime heroism, o lofty self-sacri ce, o patient
martyrdom, these beautiful Providences, these
hair-breadth escapes and terrible dangers, will
yet become the themes o the popular litera-
ture o this nation, and will excite the admi-
ration, the reverence and the indignation o
the generations yet to come.
It did not take long for McKim's
prediction to come true. The Under-
ground Railroad entered our collective
imagination in the eighteen-forties,
and it has since been a mainstay of
both national history and local lore.
But in the past decade or so it has
surged into "the popular literature of
this nation"---and the popular every-
thing else, too.This year alone has seen
the publication of two major Railroad
novels, including Oprah's first book-
club selection in more than a year, Col-
son Whitehead's "The Underground
Railroad" (Doubleday). On TV, the
WGN America network aired the first
season of "Underground," which fol-
lows the fates of a group of slaves,
known as the Macon Seven, who flee
a Georgia plantation.
Nonfiction writers, too, have lately
returned to the subject. In , the
Yale historian David Blight edited "Pas-
sages to Freedom," an anthology of es-
says on the Underground Railroad.The
following year, Fergus Bordewich pub-
lished "Bound for Canaan," the first
national history of the Railroad in more
than a century. And last year, Eric Foner,
a historian at Columbia, published
"Gateway to Freedom," about the Rail-
road's operations in New York City.
Between and , there were
two adult biographies of Harriet Tub-
man, the Railroad's most famous "con-
ductor"; more than four times as many
have been published since then, to-
gether with a growing number of books
about her for children and young
adults---five in the nineteen-seventies,
six in the nineteen-eighties, twenty-one
in the nineteen-nineties, and more than
thirty since the turn of this century. An
HBO bio-pic about Tubman is in de-
velopment, and earlier this year the U.S.
Treasury announced that, beginning in
the next decade, she will appear on the
twenty-dollar bill.
Other public and private entities
have likewise taken up the cause. Since
, the National Park Service has
been working to create a Network to
Freedom, a system of federally desig-
nated, locally managed Underground
Railroad sites around the country. The
first national museum dedicated to
the subject, the National Underground
Railroad Freedom Center, opened in
Cincinnati in , and next March
the Park Service will inaugurate its first
Railroad-related national monument:
the Harriet Tubman Underground Rail-
road State Park, in Cambridge, Mary-
land, near Tubman's birthplace.
This outpouring of interest suggests
that we have collectively caught on to
what McKim long ago understood:
that the stories of those who fled slav-
ery and those who helped them to free-
dom are among the most moving in
our nation's history. It was McKim's
hope that these stories would excite
our admiration, reverence, and indig-
nation, and they do. But, as more re-
cent work has made clear, they should
also incite our curiosity and skepticism:
about how the Underground Railroad